


My own woman

by captainhurricane



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, a character study, a relationship study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 07:54:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4821269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainhurricane/pseuds/captainhurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>About EVA.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My own woman

**Author's Note:**

> Written a while ago (before mgs5, mind you) but i forgot to add here.

Wind whips his hair, his bandanna keeping them out of his face. He’s turned his back on Eva and she doesn’t see his expression but she had seen enough. Knows what it means when those broad shoulders are that tight, when he stands with his back straight and hand nearly twitching into a salute. Eva watches. She says nothing for a moment, lets him be, say his silent goodbyes. 

“Snake, we should be moving,” she remarks quietly, the jet’s motor rumbling louder. He merely grunts and turns to her, closes the door behind him. Eva’s been trained for years to know all the microexpressions people make, to know what sadness looks like on a soldier, what deviousness looks like on a spy. Yet now she can’t tell what makes his mouth tighten so, his blue eye warming up at the sight of her. Eva opens her mouth to speak, sensing with ease that he has stuffed whatever grief he feels to the place where he keeps all the other secrets of his life.

“Mission fulfilled, both her. And me,” he murmurs, the low grumble of his voice calming. Eva doesn’t reach out to him. Not just yet. 

There is nothing on his face, nothing but that odd curl of his thin lips and the smell of gunpowder. Eva glances at him and sees the red spots on his uniform, tears where he had ended up on the ground, the pale colour streaked with flower pollen and dirt. And blood. Her blood. Is it her shadow Eva sees hanging over him even now, even as he sits by her with his face calm and staring up ahead. 

Eva steers the plane out of danger, away from the blasts and the smell of red-streaked white flowers. Away from her. 

“Snake,” she starts once they are in the clear and the sky is bright around them. He grunts. 

“John,” she stays, voice more gentle. He grunts again, his hand giving her hand a squeeze. Eva glances at him, at the way he’s staring out of the window once more. He looks oddly younger without his bandanna that he’s now clutching in his hands, his brown hair stuck on his temples. Whatever moves in Eva’s heart at the sight, she makes no comment on it. He wouldn’t want to hear it anyway, doesn’t seem like the kind of man to see beyond his mission. 

Eva thinks about The Boss, her corpse in the middle of that flower field and whatever she had said to Snake before he had killed her. Eva has to swallow at that, commit The Boss to her own memory. What a woman she had been. She had seen instantly through each of Eva’s disguise, hadn’t ever shown fear in the face of men who claimed to be bigger than they are. What a woman. Eva sighs. Snake sleeps, exhausted.

x

x

x

Telling the truth is easier when she doesn’t have to look him in the eye. 

“I am perhaps a little bit of a coward, Snake,” Eva murmurs and reaches to stroke his hair one last time. The little cabin is comfortable, him deep asleep on the carpet is all but inviting her back to his arms. But she has a job to do, has her duty and Snake- no matter what Snake is, this sharp-eyed man who had done his own duty without a hitch in the journey, no matter what he is to her she has to go. 

The recorder clicks and ends her message. She takes off the tape and leaves it for him to find. She’s a liar and sometimes she feels like she has lost herself in the middle of her jobs, her duties and all the years she has lived thus far. But he hadn’t truly cared. Had only wanted to see his own mission through, had accepted her help- and her advances- in a stride. Even held her last night, perhaps stumbling his way through it but it had made him all the more endearing to her. 

Eva sees a lot, knows a lot but she can’t see the boiling storm inside of him. Best she go on, best she leave him be. 

“I should have killed you,” she says to the cabin, to his sleeping form. His mouth is twisted, his brow furrowed. The strap of the eyepatch has pressed a red streak on his skin. 

“But I can’t.” 

She closes the door behind herself. 

x

She sees him again. And again. Each time, something about him has grown darker, has grown stranger. That little twinge inside of her is still what it is. Sometimes she catches him looking at her with a dim light in his only eye, mouth curled into that odd half-grimace she had seen when he had climbed into the plane after killing The Boss. Now she knows it’s bitter acceptance of what is and what couldn’t have been. 

x

She gives birth to his twin boys when the rain is coming down hard and he’s far away, building and destroying and planning, threatening his way to loyalty and taking steps further and further down. She looks at the little twins and knows she could love them like a true mother would given time. But they’re taken from her, separated and taken to their respective destinies. She could have loved them once and knows a tiny part of her does, the little snake children with their large eyes, one for the cold of the North, one for the heat of the South. 

x

“Are you in love with him?” Ocelot asks out of the blue one day when they’re both old enough to know better but still young enough to be unable to let go. If it had been Groznyj Grad, he would have sounded snappier, sharper. Now it’s just curiousity. Eva looks away. 

“I don’t know. Are you?” She hears his huff and looks back at him, at that amused curl of his lips that never seems to fade these days. The emblem on his shoulder is strange to her. 

“Maybe that’s the card life has dealt me,” Ocelot says and shrugs. Maybe in Groznyj Grad she might have been jealous but it had been a puppy crush then and he had been a cocky little bastard. Now that cockiness is merely streaked with self-confidence, with sadistic cruelty that wasn’t there before, his ever-present red gloves probably stained with blood under them. 

“Has he woken up yet?” It’s the wrong question to ask because it’s the same. It’s as it ever is. Ocelot sneers. Eva’s heart feels cold. She hadn’t seen him once during his coma, had sent messages but had been unable to know if he had gotten any of them. 

“What will you do if he doesn’t-” 

“He will,” Ocelot spits and stands up. Eva sees him like a mirror image of herself and raises her hand to her mouth. Ocelot is younger than her, sure but it is the same anger, same fear in him that’s in her. What if. What if. (Nobody admits that maybe it’s better if Big Boss doesn’t wake up at all. They’d known what a beast had raised its head under than scarred skin, overcome with guilt and pain from that one gunshot that ended the life of a national hero.) 

“We’re both stuck,” Eva says and smiles a joyless smile when Ocelot’s head snaps back at her. 

“He’s crushed both of us into dust. I can’t imagine-” her voice breaks, she has to look away and not think of the children, his children somewhere out there in the world. Growing up without a father, without a mother. Are they happy? 

“Stop your crying, woman,” Ocelot says but it doesn’t come off as angry. A creak of the chair tells Eva he’s sat back down. 

“I was there right after when he had killed her,” Eva says after a moment of silence, of shared, quiet breaths. Ocelot is looking at her, she knows but she can’t look at him. 

“He hid it well but there was a flicker, a second when I could see what fulfilling his mission had done to him. If I hadn’t been there, I feel like he might have fallen down where he stood. I have never seen a living man look so dead.” 

“He’s not so weak,” Ocelot says, still staring at her. Eva raises her gaze to him, studies the sharpness of his face and still catches herself thinking he’s young but he’s cruel, every inch of him is oddly frail yet cruel.

“He’s not. But the Boss.. you didn’t hear how he talked about her,” Eva continues. Ocelot says nothing at that, turns away. 

“He’ll wake up one day,” he says for a goodbye. She says nothing in return.


End file.
